Bidding on competitor brand names in Search: worth it or wasted budget?

Competitor brand bidding comes up every few months, and the case for it is easy to see. People searching a rival's name already know the category and are comparing, and CPCs can come in lower than on generic terms. The case against is just as real. CTR on these ads is often weak, ad copy that uses a competitor's trademark can get disapproved, and you end up paying to send people to a page that basically says "we're different."

Take a dental clinic bidding on a national aligner brand. The clicks come in, but if the landing page never mentions the comparison, visitors bounce. My view is that competitor terms only pay off when the page answers the comparison directly (price, availability, one concrete difference) and the ad copy stays off the trademark. Without both, that budget is better spent on generic terms. Has anyone measured a real lift from this?

Agreed on the landing page, and for local businesses I'd push it further. Plenty of people searching a rival's name just want to know whether that rival is closer, open now, or cheaper for the same visit. A clinic page that says "we're ten minutes from you, book today" with the phone number above the fold can do fine without any feature comparison. I'd judge these terms by calls and booked appointments per click, not CTR, since CTR on trademark-heavy ads is low by nature and tells you very little.

The bigger trap is volume. A national aligner brand might get a few thousand searches a month across the whole country, but only a handful from your city. At that size, a month or two of data can look like a win or a loss purely from noise, and people end up deciding based on anecdotes. Roughly how many searches a month does that rival term get in your service area?

I'd push back on the CTR part. Calling it "low by nature and tells you very little" throws away the number that shows whether Google thinks your ad is relevant. On trademark terms, weak CTR usually means the ad is reaching people who were looking for the rival and are only half interested in you. That drags down Quality Score, and a lower Quality Score means you pay more per click on the exact terms you're testing. So the cost side gets worse before anyone picks up the phone.

Calls per click doesn't fix it either, because plenty of those calls are people asking the rival's price and hanging up. Watch CTR and CPC as the cost signal, then judge the terms on booked appointments per click, and only after a couple of months of local volume.

CTR as the cost signal makes sense to me. A simple guardrail is to take your generic terms' cost per booking as the ceiling and cap rival-term spend until it beats that number. And if CTR is still well below your generic ads after two weeks, relevance is probably pushing CPC up, so pause early.